AWS GovCloud Support in Partner Generated Billing

We are happy to announce the support for AWS GovCloud accounts in our billing solution for partners. This functionality allows partners to bill customers more accurately by associating GovCloud Reserved Instances to the related commercial account. The current release will allow linking the accounts together via an easy-to-use API with a GUI planned for a future release. 

Google Cloud Platform -- General Availability

We are excited to announce the general availability of our Google Cloud Platform (GCP). We want to thank all of our beta customers who gave us candid feedback during this process. Through this support, we provide granular visibility into resource usage and consumption trending to help you save on cost and add more accountability within your GCP environment. We are just getting started on our GCP support and we are excited for customers who are part of this journey. Some key capabilities include:

• Granular visibility into resource cost and usage across all projects.

• View complex billing information through simple reports and dashboards to help you identify root causes of spend increases, find opportunities to reduce cost. 

• Govern your Google Cloud Platform through policy driven governance. 

If you want help getting started with GCP in the CloudHealth platform, read this Help Center article. 

AWS Best Practice Security Policy -- General Availability

We are pleased to announce the general availability of the CloudHealth AWS Best Practice Security Policy. You can see your security risk exposure and violations in the Health Check Pulse Report, the Security Recommendations Report, and the policy engine.

The following best practice policies have been added:

• Root account was recently used

• IAM User has password that needs rotation

• IAM Policy should only be attached to groups or roles

• CloudHealth AWS Account setup not using roles

• EC2 Classic Security Group is not being used

• VPC Flow Logs not enabled for a VPC

• CloudTrail S3 bucket is publicly accessible

• AWS Config not enabled for all regions

• AWS KMS customer master key rotation is not enabled

These policies are enabled by default for all customers. Learn how to customize the CloudHealth AWS Best Practice Security Policy in this Help Center article. 

Azure SQL Database Rightsizing -- Public Beta 

As a follow up to our private beta announcement a few weeks ago, we’re excited to announce the public beta of CloudHealth Azure SQL Database Rightsizing. In addition to monitoring your databases by their performance against your set efficiency target, some additional key features include:

• Export to CSV

• Filter by tags and perspectives

• Group by tags and perspectives

• Update reports

• Override recommendations

• Advanced filtering

The SQL Database Rightsizing Report is enabled by default for all Azure customers. As highlighted in our private beta announcement, the UI is designed in a way to easily gain visibility into how well your databases are being utilized and the best approach on rightsizing your database(s). You have a clear view into your efficiency score and which databases are underutilized, a good fit, or over target based on either the system default targets or your own custom targets. Learn more about CloudHealth Azure SQL Database Rightsizing in this Help Center article. 

EC2 Convertible Reserved Instance Exchanger -- Private Beta

We are excited to announce the private beta of the EC2 Convertible RI Exchanger. The EC2 Convertible RI Exchanger is a recommendation engine that helps you recoup savings from underutilized Convertible RIs in your AWS environment while controlling additional investment to perform an exchange. 

EC2 Convertible RI Exchanger performs the following actions:

• Identifies underutilized Convertible Reserved Instances

• Identifies On-Demand usage candidates

• Selects the most efficient candidates

• Builds you a quote that you can use to perform exchanges through the AWS console

In other words, the EC2 Convertible RI Exchanger maximizes the ROI from an exchange and enables you to increase the utilization and effectiveness of your CRI inventory. 

Learn more about the CloudHealth EC2 Convertible RI Exchanger in this Help Center article. If you would like to participate in this private beta, please contact mikeg@cloudhealthtech.com.

Updates to Perspectives UI

We recently updated the asset labels in the Perspectives builder dropdown to improve clarity. Specifically, the following labels have changed:

• There is an info bubble next to 'Choose an asset type' drop-down title.

• The list is now based on alphabetical order and on the expected usage frequency i.e. Amazon, Azure, GCP, Data Center and then everything else alphabetically ordered.

• Asset(...) and 'Amazon Taggable Asset' categories will now be the top 2 categories in the Amazon section and similarly 'Azure Taggable Asset' will be the topmost category in Azure section.

• 'Amazon Taggable Asset' will now read 'Amazon Taggable Asset (Does not gather associated assets)' and similarly 'Azure Taggable Asset' will now read 'Azure Taggable Asset (Does not gather associated assets)'.

Action Required — Update Your IAM Policy Permissions

We are in the process of adding inventory collection and reporting for three services -- Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) Subscriptions, Amazon CloudWatch Alarms, and Amazon CloudWatch Metric Filters. If you update your IAM policy using the auto-generated IAM policy in the platform, no further action is required. If you update your IAM policy manually, there are additional permissions that you need to add to your IAM policy:

• sns:listSubscriptions

• sns:listSubscriptionsByTopic

• sns:getSubscriptionAttributes

• cloudwatch:DescribeAlarms

• logs:describeMetricFilters

Learn more about updating AWS account policies in this Help Center article.